Looks Like A Good One…

With its explicit descriptions of lovemaking, the book has been compared to Marguerite Duras’s coming-of-age novel, “The Lover,” and to Catherine Millet’s more recent confessional essay, “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” Yet in this case the feisty 40-something North African author who goes by the name of Nedjma appears to have been motivated by more than a desire to titillate.

Rather, she explained in a recent conversation here to coincide with Grove Press’s publication of the novel in the United States this month, by portraying a woman enjoying the pleasures of the flesh, she wanted both to celebrate the body as an expression of life and to strike a blow against the centuries-old repression of Muslim women.